


Mabel and Ford's Fabulous Catastic Adventure

by BernRul



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Canon Compliant, Family Bonding, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 15:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12707517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BernRul/pseuds/BernRul
Summary: One summer morning, Mabel and Ford bond over knockoff stancakes, lost love, and caticatures.





	Mabel and Ford's Fabulous Catastic Adventure

**Author's Note:**

> I always felt that it was a shame that Ford and Mabel never had a chance to bond or go on adventures together in the actual show. This is my attempt to fix that in my own, small way.

Stanford Pines hated feeling like a stranger in his own house. He built this house for crying out loud, but now it felt horribly alien, mostly thanks to his twin transforming it into a gaudy tourist trap. He couldn’t venture from the basement without running into some hapless sight seer making “ooh” sounds at the Two-Eyed Cyclops (what?) and the Incredible Half-Baby, Half-Gerbil Who Eats Money (Soos wasn’t even trying with that one). He would have avoided the upper level, and his twin, if not for the children. In the past two weeks he’d become close to Dipper in particular.

Last night he overheard Stanley arguing over the phone in furious, fluent Spanish (since when had Stan been bilingual? Had it really been so long since Stan had butchered every Hebrew pronunciation at his bar mitzvah?). He hung up the phone and said to Ford, “Look, I hate asking, but I have urgent business to attend to tomorrow. The kids don’t really need watching—hell, half of the time I got no clue where they are—just hold down the fort, you know? Make sure Dipper doesn’t bring back a Gobgremlin whatever, and don’t let Mabel and her knitting needles anywhere near my suits. Think you can handle that, Pointdexter?” 

Please. Stanford had traversed the multiverse; he could handle two preteens. 

So he headed upstairs the next morning to make sure that Mabel hadn’t bedazzled Stan’s knock off suits and Dipper hadn’t traumatized the tourists. He was greeted by the sweet, sweet smell of cooking pancakes. His grandniece stood in front of the stove, tapping a spatula against the golden brown batter, singing a pop song he didn’t recognize at full volume. 

“Good morning, Grunkle Stan!” she shouted.

“Good morning, Mabel,” he replied, wondering for the tenth time why Stanley insisted on being addressed as ‘grunkle.’ 

“I’m cooking up a Mabel-icious take on the old classic, stancakes!” she declared. Ford felt a twinge of nostalgia. ‘Stancakes’ were the only meal teenage Stanley could make; they were fifteen and Stan wanted to be able to eat pancakes any time of the day. They were always pretty good, too, though he doubted Mabel, for all of her enthusiasm, could replicate it. “Only I don’t have a catchy name for it like stancakes. I’m thinking ‘Mabelicious’ but that doesn’t tell you that it’s pancakes, just that it’s super delicious. Anyway, sit down! Pour yourself a refreshing glass of Mabel Juice.”

Feeling that he’d have to be a gigantic ass to decline, he pulled a seat. The pitcher on the table, which could only be the so-called Mabel Juice, contained some kind of obnoxious red liquid and tiny plastic dinosaurs.

“Mabel?” he asked. “Why are there toy dinosaurs in the juice?”

“To give it that extra pizzazz,” she replied without looking away from the stove.

“Choking hazards count as pizzazz?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Grunkle Ford, you aren’t supposed to swallow it. It just gives it that extra kick that makes your taste buds love you.”

“And you sanitized it first, right?”

“Please, dawg,” she said. He wasn’t reassured, but he couldn’t have survived multiple dimension hops if he were overly squeamish, so he poured himself a (small) glass. It tasted like someone had painted his tongue in pure corn syrup. Or like a pack of jellybeans had been liquefied. It was…rather good. 

“This is wonderful,” Ford told the girl. She beamed. She beamed at just about everything, from the mailman approaching the door to the bread popping out of the toaster, but Ford still felt a little thrill that he’d given her a reason to smile like that. 

“Thanks! I had to invent it because Mom says I can’t drink coffee until high school.”

Privately, Ford thought that Mabel should never be allowed near coffee at all; the girl had enough energy without caffeine added to the mix.

“Ta-da! Mabel’s Unnamed Knock-off Stancakes are finished!”

With that, Mabel slid a plate across the table. The pancakes were shaped in what he’d guess was a star with a smiley face, covered in a light green powder that he realized, after a moment, was glitter. 

“Mabel, why are these pancakes covered in glitter?”

“It’s not covered, it’s just a few sprinkled around to give it color.”

“You do realize that glitter is toxic for human consumption, right?” Ford asked. Well, at least this explained the mystery of why the girl had literally coughed up glitter when he first came out of the portal. He had been wondering.

“If you say so, but I’ve been eating it for years with literally no problems. Like, zero. Trust me, Grunkle Ford, the human body is way more durable than you think.”

Ford still had his doubts, so he used his fork to slide the glitter from his pancakes as discretely as possible. Thankfully, the glitter wasn’t embedded into the batter, but just sprinkled superficially on the top. Mabel didn’t seem to mind, being too busy stuffing her face with gusto. 

"How about Mabel Goodness?" Ford said mid-bite.

"Huh now?"

"You coud call your version of stancakes 'Mabel Goodness.' You know, like maple goodness?"

"Grunkle Ford, you're a genius!" she exclaimed. Ford tried not to look too smug. 

They continued to eat. They weren't bad, Ford decided, but not as good as Stan's. They lapsed into silence, a rare occurance whenever Mabel was involved, and Ford somehow felt it was his responsibility to fill it before things became too awkward. He struggled to come up with something to say to her. He often observed Stan with the twins, and as horrendous a caretaker as Stan clearly was, he could maintain a rapport with both of them effortlessly. Ford tried not to feel too jealous. 

“Where’s Dipper?” was what he finally settled on. 

She snickered. “Oh, my bro-bro’s off with Weeeendy. He says he’s over her, but I ask you, would you turn into a pile of gelatinous goo around a girl you were over?”

“I see,” said Ford. After their game of D&D& More D, Ford had read over Dipper’s additions to Journal 3; while he was overall impressed, he did make a note of his nephew’s romantic obsession.

“But I get how it can be—love, you know? I’ve had my share of hopelessly tragic summer romances. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Mermando.”

“Sorry, did you just say ‘Mermando?’” 

“Yeah, because that was his name. Didn’t I mention that he’s a Spanish-speaking merman? A dreamy Spanish-speaking merman,” she added, her eyes going ridiculously round, staring off wistfully into the distance. 

“You’ve actually met a merperson?” Ford said. Come to think of it, he did remember reading something about a merman in the journal. It had been drawn in the brightest colored crayons, and if he was being honest, he tended to skim over those pages, more intent on reading Dipper’s writing than Mabel's. 

“Dude, I haven’t just met merpeople, I’ve loved merpeople. Or, more specifically, a merperson, Mermando.”

“Fascinating,” Ford said. “Tell me all about it.”

“It was your standard tragic love story. Girl meets hunky, mysterious boy in the community pool. Boy turns out to be a merman. Girl rescues merman and reunites him with his long lost family. Girl’s brother kisses merman as reverse CPR. Merman is forced to marry the queen of the manatees to avoid an undersea war,” she finished with a deep sigh.

“Underwater alliance? Ocean wars? You know, in all of my years of research, I’ve never given much attention to oceanic anomalies. The implications—” he caught himself off, abruptly, at the sad look on Mabel’s face. “Ahem. Sorry for, uh, sorry for your loss.”

“It’s okay,” she said with a theatrical sigh. Then she perked up immediately, like a switch had been flipped. “Have you ever been in love Grunkle Ford?”

He inwardly winced. “Love” was never his favorite topic. In Ford’s experience, love meant betrayal: betrayal by a brother who crushed his aspirations like a bag of toffee peanuts; betrayal at the brink of his life’s work, by a being he’d given half of his soul to, a flatterer who’d strung him along as easily as Stan bamboozled tourists.

“No,” he said flatly. To his surprise, the girl appeared to have picked up on the weight behind his answer, judging by the curiosity that danced in her eyes. Ford hastily changed the subject. 

“So, Mabel, um…any thoughts on what you’d like to be when you grow up?”

Smooth, Sixer, real smooth. Wasn’t that the generic question every adult asked children? How’s school, what do you want to be when you grow up? It wasn’t like he knew that much about Mabel, aside from her glitter obsession and habit of shouting every other syllable, and unlike Dipper, he didn’t have a lot in common with her.

“Hmm, let’s see…right now I’m more focused on just being me, you know, in the moment. Maybe…hmm, maybe a businesswoman?”

She stated it like a question, like she wasn’t quite sure of the answer herself. Ford felt surprised by the answer; he’d expected her to say artist, perhaps, something along those lines. 

“Why a businesswoman?”

“”Well, you see, a couple of weeks ago I had this idea for ‘cat-icatures,’ which are basically—”

“Let me guess, caricatures of cats? No, caricatures of people as cats!”

“Bingo! So I just made it cuz, duh who doesn’t want to see all of their loved ones as cats? And they just sold like crazy! So I’m thinking maybe I could do something like that—make things people like and sell them. Grunkle Stan even said he’d be my manager.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, Mabel,” Ford said, with a rush of affection for the girl. “Though you might want to reconsider having Stan as your manager—he will swindle you blind, he can’t help himself.”

“Hey, you know what? I never made a cat-icature of you, Grunkle Ford!”

Which was how Ford found himself hunched over a mostly maple syrup free table, arguing with a preteen over the finer points of sketching himself as a cat. 

“It’s good, Mabel, but I don’t know if I need that many whiskers.”

“But Grunkle Ford, you have whiskers right now! How are you not seeing this?”

She stopped abruptly and cocked her head towards the doorway. Ford followed her gaze to find his nephew standing in the doorway, panting heavily. Even from a distance, it was obvious that the boy was coated in a thin layer of perspiration.

“Omigosh,” Dipper let out, “you guys won’t believe what happened! So after I said goodbye to Wendy, I was taking a short cut through the woods, which okay I know is totally creepy but I thought, hey, I can handle it. Anyway, I saw these glowing red eyes peeking out at them from the bushes, and I saw—I saw—”

Dipper’s face clouded over in confusion. “I…what was I saying?”

“You were in the woods, saw creepy glowing eyes? Ring any bells?” Mabel said.

“Um…no.” Dipper brought his hand to his forehead. “I, um, I don’t remember anything after Wendy’s. This is freaky.”

“Fascinating,” Ford said, as Dipper started to hyperventilate. “Do you see what this means? You’ve encountered some kind of creature that can wipe all memories of itself. I’ve heard rumors of such a beast, but never actually had a chance to study it…or if I did, I’ve forgotten all about it,” he added with a chuckle. 

Dipper’s eyes went wide, all worry forgotten. “So I found something you haven’t studied before?”

“Until now,” Ford declared. “If you give me a moment to find the proper resources, we can head out together.”

Ford glanced down at the admittedly uncanny drawing of his feline form, then met the gaze of Mabel, whose big brown eyes had lost just the tiniest bit of light.

“We’ll need as much help as we can get for a being this powerful,” he said, before he could think better of it. “Mabel, would you like to join us?”

“Okay, Grunkle Ford!” she beamed.

“Excellent,” he said, watching the two excited children as they rushed to prepare for the next adventure.


End file.
